<\/p>\n
Don’t believe what you hear
\nDon’t believe what you see
\nIf you just close your eyes
\nYou can feel the enemy<\/i><\/p>\n
Hypocrisy. Duplicity. Inconsistency. Justification. <\/p>\n
I sit and I think about my faith. I think about the man I aspire to be, and the One I aspire to be more like. There is a gulf between my standards and my actions, and more often than not, not only do I feel a pull away from those standards, I welcome the pull.<\/p>\n
Do I try to conform my life to a belief system, or do I wrap my belief system around my life? Is even my study of theology lately just a prop? Do I pick and choose fragments, clinging to those I’ve seen borne out by personal experience or hoped-for experience? Do I justify the things I do by subtly, perhaps subconsciously, altering my opinions and beliefs instead of raising my actions to meet the standards?<\/p>\n
I have always strived for consistency in my viewpoints and beliefs, inasmuch as the Bible is my standard of truth. I study them. I read up on philosophies and dogmas that set themselves up in opposition to at least part of my array of beliefs. I follow lines of reasoning until they peter out. I think about philosophies as a whole and all their possible points of contact with reality if lived to their fullest extent.<\/p>\n
But what is consistency? Why is consistency so important in one’s worldview? It almost seems like the cardinal virtue at times. What does consistency mean? I have standards to which my actions adhere (hopefully) under all circumstances, and with allowance for the breadth of situations I am likely to encounter and the range of applications of my beliefs, a given input produces a given output. Simplistic? Perhaps. But it means that even if you do not agree with my response to a situation, you can trust that my reactions will be consistent. You know what to expect. I am reliable; I am predictable (in the good way); I have character, good or bad.<\/p>\n
And sometimes I feel suffocated by this time-box that encloses my day-to-day, demanding consistency as I grope into the darkness ahead, this unending progression from moment to moment that I can’t understand<\/i>, fingers of my mind scratching, grasping, fists closing around thin air. I want to see; I want to know; I want to be lifted up, high, high above the times and the shapes and the colors and structures and the quarks and the supernovae and the state of being that attaches itself to us even before our puny lungs fill for the first time, nascent breaths and sandcastles, paper universes and our peripheral vision, spanning nothing, feeling no one, sensing only the longing, only the longing, only the longing<\/i>… So shortsighted. Those empiricists among us don’t have as much to rest their dogma on as they might think. I awake only to find myself another layer of the dream.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And sometimes, a lot of the time, my life feels like it would be a lot more consistent if I gave it up. But the question comes: Do I value consistency more highly than those ideals I strive for and constantly fall short of? We are all flawed; we are all inconsistent–no one lives up to the standards they set for themselves; the only difference is the degree, and that no one can know, not even relative to our own self. Pursuing perfect conformity between my lifestyle and worldview as end unto itself, whether I know it or not, is a drop-off. <\/p>\n
And as has been said, “You’ve already made the decision. Now you must understand why you’ve made it.” Which is another way to express the act of living it out.<\/p>\n
I am arriving at a crossroads; that much I know.<\/p>\n
I must be an acrobat
\nTo talk like this
\nAnd act like that
\nAnd you can dream
\nSo dream out loud
\nAnd don’t let the bastards grind you down<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}